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Areas › Worry and anxiety › The cost of avoiding
Ten hours of sleep followed by a slow morning turns home into somewhere far nicer than school, and a body clock that drifts later makes the next attempt harder again. Holding the shape of the day does two things at once: home stops being the better offer, and the child stays close to the version of the day they have to walk back into. It is dull to enforce, and for most families it is the single most useful thing they do.
You who believe, be steadfast, more steadfast than others; be ready (Quran 3:200). Readiness here reads as a daily posture rather than a single act of will.
آل عمران
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ ٱصۡبِرُواْ وَصَابِرُواْ وَرَابِطُواْ وَٱتَّقُواْ ٱللَّهَ لَعَلَّكُمۡ تُفۡلِحُونَ
You who believe, be steadfast, more steadfast than others; be ready; always be mindful of God, so that you may prosper
Qur’an 3:200read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In a randomised study of people with insomnia, acceptance and commitment therapy improved sleep quality along with experiential avoidance and emotion regulation. Those were adults with a sleep disorder rather than children out of school, and it is a single trial. It does support treating sleep and avoidance as connected rather than as two separate problems living in the same house.
Zakiei A, Khazaie H, Rostampour M, Lemola S, Esmaeili M, Dürsteler K, Brühl AB, Sadeghi-Bahmani D, Brand S. (2021). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) Improves Sleep Quality, Experiential Avoidance, and Emotion Regulation in Individuals with Insomnia-Results from a Randomized Interventional Study.. Life (Basel, Switzerland) doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A day that keeps its usual shape stays near the day you are trying to return to.
Staff who think a child is playing them will respond in ways that make school worse. A short explanation of how avoidance actually works changes what happens in the corridor.
Somewhere between five and ten children in every hundred struggle to get to school at some point, and one or two of those need real help with it. Your family is not a strange case.
Not every child who is not at school is frightened of school. Some are kept at home by what is happening there, some have decided the place is not worth it, and some are angry about one specific thing.